Announcing the 2022 NCWIT National AiC Educator Award Recipients
The National NCWIT Aspirations in Computing (AiC) Educator Award elevates one or more educators whose work exemplifies the best of the AiC Educator Award. The Award identifies outstanding formal and informal educators who play a pivotal role in encouraging 9th-12th grade students who are women, genderqueer, or non-binary students to explore their interest in computing and technology. The award also recognizes these educators for their efforts to promote gender equity in computing.
In its fifth year running, NCWIT is pleased to announce the 2022 National NCWIT AiC Educator Award recipients: Nicholas Bousquet, Maria Camarena, Mark Godinez, and Amanda Lattimore. Read their full commendations below.
The National AiC Educator Award is sponsored by AT&T.
Nicholas Bousquet
Nicholas Bousquet teaches computer science at Plainfield High School in Connecticut, where he also runs the coding club, is building a computer science lab, serves as a building-level tech mentor, and consults for the district’s K-8 CSforALL SCRIPT implementation. Despite joining the school only recently, Bousquet’s passion for promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion is already having an impact: enrollment by students who identify as Black, Indigenous, or People of Color in his courses exceeds proportional representation, and enrollment of women and non-binary students in computer science is growing.
Bousquet’s leadership roles outside of the classroom focus on the development of equity-minded computer science instructional resources for several national professional learning communities for teachers. He credits a 2015 Ted Talk by Ashley Gavin, who defined computer science as “a medium for problem solving and self-expression,” for the core pedagogy that drives the development of his CSforALL instructional resources. He begins by observing where underrepresented students can be found within a school, such as a biomed class that is passionate about public health or a choral group that loves performance, and then develops accessible, hands-on labs such as a DNA Analyzer Programming Lab with Kanban, or a Coding Pop Music Lab in Java. “Authentic, interest-driven and inquiry-based activities such as these have been well received in both my classroom and my colleagues’ classrooms across the country, and particularly invaluable in our collective efforts to broaden participation in computing,” he shares. Bousquet is also excited about the interdisciplinary potential that integrated data science activities can offer. He has been working with Brown University’s Bootstrap Curriculum Development Team, and his classroom-ready blended learning labs have found their way into schools from coast to coast. He is also the founder of HourOfData.org, which he hopes will help attract both teachers and students to the field of data science.
Maria Camarena
Maria Camarena teaches computer science at Maywood Center for Enriched Studies, a Los Angeles Unified School for grades six through twelve with approximately 1,400 students. While first preparing for the role five years ago, when the school opened, Camarena was surprised to learn of the lack of diversity among the computer science students in her district, given the predominantly Hispanic/Latinx community. Additionally, there were only one or two computer science classes being offered at the high school level, and there were no such classes offered to the lower grades. Over the course of her tenure, Camarena has made it her mission to establish a computer science pathway from middle school to high school. Today, the school offers computer science to all seventh graders, as well as eight computer science classes for high school students, empowering more than 500 students in their pursuit of computer science studies. Camarena is excited to report that of the inaugural group of seventh graders who took the computer science class, 10 of them are taking the AP Computer Science Principles class as eleventh graders, and six of them are girls.
Camarena also sponsors the school’s Girls Who Code club, which enables her to connect with families about the importance of exposing girls to computer science at an early age, and she established her school’s chapter of the Computer Science Honor Society. Through a partnership with the Neuvo Foundation, she conducts several online sessions a year with Microsoft engineers and other personnel, with the goal of students talking and interacting with individuals who resemble their culture and origins. “I am a firm believer that you can’t be what you can’t see. I want my students to believe that computer science is possible for people who look and sound like them,” she says.
Mark Godinez
Mark Godinez runs the Academy of IT at South Dade Senior High School, which he founded four years ago. Although he did not have any women students in the program’s first year, his successful recruiting efforts since then have earned him the AP Female Diversity Award in 2019 and 2020. Godinez has also worked hard to increase the number of women students pursuing engineering and robotics at his school, helping to start its first VEX Robotics tournament and assemble its first all-women robotics team. He received a grant to field a FIRST Robotics team, which enabled the participation of women students, as well as those with disabilities. He is also partnering with Deaf Kids Code to provide transportation for deaf and hard-of-hearing students from a local middle school to participate in a programming event.
Godinez is also passionate about promoting IT and engineering outside of school. He works with the children of migrant workers in the local community through the Title 1 Migrant Education Program, and he serves as a 5000 Role Model Mentor for Black students. Because many of the students in his district lack technology resources at home, he has partnered with Project 10Million to distribute more than 400 wireless hotspot devices to those in need. He also helped start the Miami chapter of the Computer Science Teachers Association and was Chapter Secretary for two years. In 2021, he was nominated for the Latinx Educator of the Year Award.
Among the obstacles to advancing STEM opportunities in his community, Godinez cites “students who do not leave the area and see no opportunity in technology or engineering,” as well as reaching and motivating women students to join a traditionally male-dominated field and providing relatable role models for them. He is dedicated to doing all he can to break down these barriers and promote computer science and technology opportunities for all.
Amanda Lattimore
Amanda Lattimore is a computer science resource teacher for Baltimore County Public Schools, where she supports more than 90 computer science educators in grades six through twelve. She was the first such resource teacher both in her district and in the state, transitioning into this role after 10 years of teaching computer science to help address the growth of these classes in her district. In her role, she helps teachers plan for their classes; co-teaches or models lessons; helps with pedagogy and content knowledge; and facilitates quarterly professional learning communities so teachers can collaborate and ask questions. She also continues to teach computer science classes through the eLearning department, which has greatly increased equity and access for students in her district.
Lattimore also works with the National Alliance for Partnerships in Equity to help increase enrollment for women and students of color, educating guidance counselors at schools throughout the district about the computer science curriculum and who "belongs" in the courses. Additionally, she provides professional development training to teachers across the state through the Maryland Center for Computing Education. As a College Board AP mentor for the AP Computer Science Principles course, she mentors six to eight teachers a year, throughout the United States, in areas that include equity and recruiting for diversity.
“I truly believe that every student should take a computer science course in high school,” she says. “I am also passionate about finding teachers with diverse cultures and backgrounds to teach computer science courses in my district. Most of our schools are not majority white, and students need teachers who look like them and who have different experiences, like working in industry.”
